Am I Going to Die?

The Question That Should Change How We Think About Countering Gun Violence

Her name was Sequoya Bacon-Jones.

Nine years old. Playing outside on a summer evening in Trenton, New Jersey. A stray round found her. In her last conscious moments, she asked the only question that mattered to her.

“Am I going to die?”

I was in that room when Colonel Pat Callahan of the New Jersey State Police opened a countering violence summit with her story. Dignitaries, commanders, analysts, and seasoned detectives who had seen things most people never will. The room went quiet. Not politely quiet. The other kind. The kind where eyes begin to sweat.

I have shared that story from stages across the country, and even internationally, ever since. Not just because it is dramatic. But because it is the clearest answer I have found to the question every crime gun intelligence program eventually has to face: why does this work deserve everything you have?

After years inside this work, almost a decade researching and speaking about it, and countless hours alongside Pete Gagliardi - the man who has forgotten more about ballistic intelligence than most of us will ever know - I can tell you what actually breaks these programs. Not the budget. Not the technology. It is that nobody ever gave the people running it a reason to stay past 4:00 p.m. on a workday.

Every element in Stop Chasing Shooters (the NIBIN infrastructure, the tracing systems, the data platforms, the analytic capability) is a what or a how. Get them right and you have built a capable machine. A machine without a why runs until the first budget freeze, the first leadership change, the first Friday afternoon when nobody feels like pushing it uphill anymore.

Sequoya’s killer admitted to taking her life in April of 2026. Her mother spent four years waiting for that phone call.

That is what resolution for families means in practice. Not a phrase on a briefing slide. A mother who is no longer waiting.

Justice for victims. Resolution for families. Peace for affected communities.

That is the why. Find it first. Everything else follows.

Stop Chasing Shooters: The Crime Gun Intelligence Architecture is available now on Amazon.